Curiosity
by Lirillith
Summary: In the years after Zack's disappearance, Aerith has to come to terms with not knowing.


Author's note: I haven't yet watched "Last Order," and while I doubt it covers the same ground as this, any similarities or discrepancies are purely coincidental.

Curiosity

If there's one thing in the world I wouldn't wish on anyone, it's not knowing.

Zack was gone, for five years. Just... gone. He wasn't dead; I would have known if he was dead. He left, saying he couldn't tell me where they were going but he'd try to call me while he was there if he got a chance. I didn't think that'd really happen – he didn't deal well with phones, especially not if all his buddies were around, and it was safest for me that he not call me much where Shinra could track it – but I still sort of hoped he would. But there was no word. Two weeks passed, and I started thinking he'd be back any day now, but he wasn't. Fifteen days, sixteen, seventeen... time _crawls_ when you're waiting. A little ways into the third week, I finally decided to risk calling the barracks. As a SOLDIER First Class he had a private room in their dormitory, but they all shared a phone.

So I found a pay phone, looked up the number I'd written down and stuffed in my pocket, and waited. After four rings, a man picked up – he sounded older, he sounded kind and a little sorry for me as he said, no, no word from him, he hasn't returned, I can take a message if you want. I said no, that's okay. I called again the fourth week, and got a younger guy this time, impatient – he didn't offer to take a message. Two days later it was the first man again, and this time I told him to say that Aerith called, that he should come see me. He promised to leave the message for Zack. Still nothing. A week later, I was told he still hadn't even returned. I started to wonder if the man was covering for him. When I tried again two weeks after that, I gave the pay phone's number for a return call and hovered by it to sell my flowers for the next month. After that I started to notice Reno tailing me, so I had to vary my routine again.

I make it sound a lot more reasonable than it was. I could barely think about anything else. Certain songs on the radio made me cry, just like clockwork, even if the second before I heard one of them I'd been thinking that I'd kill him with my bare hands for doing this to me, that he had to have dumped me in the most chickenshit way imaginable, that he didn't even have the spine to call me or have somebody tell me for him, that the men at the base were covering for him, pitying me or laughing at me, that Zack and his new girlfriend were laughing at me. And then that _damn song_ would come on, playing out of somebody's car window or in a restaurant, _everything reminds me of you_ or _however far away_ and I'd just break into tears in the middle of the street, duck into a doorway and press my fist against my lips. Restaurants were even worse, because people would come up to me and ask what was wrong; I made friends with half the waitresses on the Plate rim, the low-rent district, that summer, because even when I said it was nothing they didn't believe me. I'd end up bawling into a napkin about how they all said he hadn't even come back, _where was he,_ did he desert to run off with some girl? And after that they'd always remember me, give me free coffee like I was a night-shift cop they wanted to keep around and ask if there'd been any word, men are all dogs, probably better off without him, honey.

After Reno dislodged me from the phone booth I'd been haunting, though, I tried to take stock of the situation. It had been nearly three months. Trying to think of things rationally, it really didn't seem like Zack to dump me by avoiding me. He tended to be tactless, not spineless. He'd broken up with a girl just before he met me – sometimes he'd tell me I'd completely ruined his plans for singlehood by turning up when I did – and sometimes she'd turn up around places he liked to hang out. They'd get into loud arguments, and eventually he started taking me other places rather than tempt fate – that was how we started spending so much time in the church – but he once actually turned down a friend's offer to slip out the back door when he saw her before she spotted him. So it really didn't seem like his style, unless he thought I'd be an even more unhinged ex than she was. Which was possible, because I was really a mess.

I spent a week in the church, weeding, planting, just messing with things. I could feel the Planet there, stronger than I could anywhere else, which helped me reach some kind of peace, at least while I was there. I ripped up a fresh patch of floor and tried without much luck to push some of the remains of the pews around. I'd come home late, dirty and tired, and eat whatever Mom had kept warm for me. She always ate the meal alone, but waited up for me; sometimes she'd make me a sandwich if the food hadn't kept well. She didn't say much, which was good, because we'd had some screaming fights when I first started going out with him and if she'd had much to say about him vanishing like this I probably would have come unglued. Being tired helped calm me down, and being in contact with the Planet gave me some peace, but I don't think there was enough peace in the world back then to keep me from fighting with Mom about Zack.

After that week, I decided I'd make one last call. Not to his barracks, to Shinra military. That'd lay to rest the fear of his buddies covering for him, anyway. I found a pay phone I'd never used before, dialed, then as it rang thought of using a hankie or something to disguise my voice, but I didn't even have a tissue and someone was picking up. I said I wanted to ask about a member of SOLDIER, and I was put on hold and transferred, and then I found I was speaking to a woman. I gave his name, rank, the three digits I remembered of his serial number. I heard typing. "I'm sorry," she said. "We don't have a record of a SOLDIER member by that name. Are you sure you heard the name correctly?"

I went cold all over. "I... what?"

"We don't have anyone in SOLDIER of that name, by any rank. I might have entered the name wrong," she offered. She spelled it back to me.

"That was it," I said. My knees felt like water, and as I reached for the phone book shelf to support myself, my hand trembled.

"If you had the whole serial number..." she suggested.

"No, I... I must have been wrong, I guess, if I get any more info I guess I'll try again. Thanks," I babbled, and went to hang up the phone. I fumbled it the first time, hung it up on the seocnd try with a clank – I remember thinking _I bet that sounds great_ – then collapsed on my knees on the floor, staring at my hands. They were shaking. I'd seen his ID tag. I knew how his name was spelled. What was going _on?_

After a while I gathered myself up and took the empty basket, headed home. Everything seemed unreal. I knew Shinra had experiments and plans that sounded like bad science fiction. I was a planned target for one of them. But that kind of thing wasn't a part of my daily life, not really, and disappearing Zack this way was bizarre and terrifying. Why would they do it? And was Zack okay? Had they disappeared him and killed him, or just disappeared him and sent him off on a secret mission to the ends of the earth where there were no phones at all? Either way, _why?_ Was it the association with me? That didn't make any sense; if anything they'd want me to be able to reach him because it would make me easier to find. And besides, I obviously wasn't a high priority, because I was still running around free. Changing the train I took to the plate wouldn't have cut it if Reno were really trying to catch me.

That was why I screamed when Tseng suddenly materialized behind me. I'd been staring blankly at the window of the train, my own reflection and the city streaming past beyond that, when suddenly his reflection appeared next to mine. I jumped and turned to face him, and he caught my arm to steady me.

"You've lost weight," he said.

I yanked my arm free. "Yeah, new diet. Coffee and decaf."

He replaced his arms behind his back, that military posture of his. Zack stood like that sometimes too; he'd stood that way when he was on his best behavior for dinner with my mom. He'd called her "ma'am" the whole evening. "Don't worry about him, Aerith," Tseng said.

"Oh, okay! I'm planning to try levitating, too, any advice on that?"

"He's not dead."

"Oh, God," I said, and I shoved my fist at my lips again, scared I'd start crying in front of him. "I figured you knew I was seeing him, I mean, you knew my grades when I was in school, but... do you know anything more?" He looked over his shoulder, down the empty train car. "Please, Tseng."

"There's no more I can tell you. It's unlikely you'll see him again, but he's alive." I kept looking at him as long as I could, then looked down when I felt tears in my eyes. "It's no fault of his," Tseng said, finally. "He's simply... unavailable."

"Why scrub his records?" I demanded. I _did_ sound like I was about to cry. Dammit.

"I can't tell you that."

"Tseng!"

"No." He turned away, looking out the window.

"Why tell me even this much, then?"

No answer for a little while. "It seemed best," he said. "It's harder to not find you, when you keep calling." Then he turned to leave. "Of course you never saw me."

"I know," I said. I wanted more, but I managed, "Thank you." I wanted to add something like "you bastard," just because he makes me so _mad_ and I don't like him feeling I owe him anything – it's his decision to spook in, show me they're watching me, and slip away, and while I approve of him letting me go, it's not my doing – but I did owe him some gratitude for this.

I don't know if my call for Zack's records was what summoned him, or if he'd been planning the visitation anyway. I never asked him. I got home that night and went to my room without eating to sob my heart out. Mom knocked at the door once, but I didn't answer, and she didn't come in. I believed Tseng; it may seem stupid, but in some ways I trusted him. And this was almost definitely all I'd ever know about what happened to Zack until he died, which I really didn't want. Unless it turned out he _had_ a chance to talk to me and didn't take it, in which case I would kill him, but other than that, I wanted him alive and well even if that meant he was far away from me.

Of course, I never knew if he was well, just that he was alive. And I knew when he died, four and a half years later. I felt it like a light going off or a noise suddenly stopping, and I stopped in my tracks on the sidewalk; I was at the outer edge of the plate, late that night, and no one was really around. I saw a mako leak ahead of me, green bubbles filled with light drifting up on a current of warm air and sinking back down, and I half-ran toward it, trying in my head the whole way to reach him. He was trying to find me, but didn't know how; I'd felt that before, with Mr. Gainsborough looking for Mom, with a classmate who died in a motorcycle crash looking for her parents and stumbling on me.

I felt regret from him, clearer once I got near the mako, and annoyance; he didn't think much of the people who'd killed him. Ordinary MPs, losers, and they'd just shot him, of all the lame ways to go, he didn't get to go out with a fight. I could practically hear his voice. It had felt like there was a crack in my life, once. I'd found a way to patch it up and leave it alone, move on, but now everything I'd put between my life and the loss was gone. He'd meant to see me once he got here. He was _close,_ and he'd lost so much time as it was. I didn't know what that meant exactly, but he didn't just mean time with me. I saw glimpses of glass, white coats, and felt deeper anger. I chewed a hangnail on my thumb, staring at the mako, trying to reach out to him, but he was going. I felt a flash of recognition from him, and I felt like crying, because he'd been so happy to recognize me, but he was letting go.

I didn't cry, that night. I'd already known I'd probably never see him again, so I'd said goodbye to him, in most ways, long before. If anything I felt comforted, that he hadn't just abandoned me, that he'd wanted to see me, even if that made it hurt again, too. I lay in bed sleepless, staring at the ceiling and trying to make sense of what I knew. I wished I could ask the Planet questions, but while in some sense it might know everything that happened, specifics of individual human lives were as much a mystery to it as the thought processes of ants were to me. I could feel it faintly, though; all those lives and souls, not lost, just changed into something else. Zack was there. He hadn't wanted to leave me, and that helped some, though now I had to gnaw over what had happened, what kept him away. I wished I could speak to him, but that wasn't really how it worked, and if there was a way I didn't know it. I wished, not for the first time, that my mother, my birth mother, had lived; there was so much I needed to learn from her.

I'd thought I'd never know, or even have a chance to know or help, and that was something I'd just have to live with even though I hated it. I thought it was probably some kind of Shinra experimentation, like they'd wanted to do to me, and my birth mother, back when I was younger. I didn't think I'd ever know more about it than that. And then one day I was standing near one of the plants, offering flowers to people who were coming out at the ends of their shifts, when suddenly there was an explosion that shook the ground, there were others outside, fire, smoke, and people were yelling and running while I just stood there, frozen like an idiot. Some people were running towards the plant, most of them away. I got knocked down in the chaos, stood up and brushed myself off, and that was when I saw him. A blond guy with that huge, spiky hair that had been so trendy with SOLDIERs five years before, and blue eyes with that odd glow to them. The way he stood, cracked his knuckles, shoved his hair from his face and then headed towards me was so much like Zack it made my heart hurt.

I sold him a flower. I wrote it off as a coincidence. When he fell practically into my lap the next night, I started to wonder. I made that bodyguard deal with him, I found myself flirting without realizing it, but I pretended not to know why Reno was after me; I didn't want to mention they'd never come this close to capturing me before, that something was different now. Zack's death; this guy who acted so much like him, turning up when he did; the plant explosions; the Turks coming after me in earnest; something was going on, but I didn't know what was connected to what, or if any of it was connected at all.

I hadn't ever really thought about fate, though both my mothers seemed to believe in it. "Maybe it's for the best," Mom would say, or "maybe you're just not meant to do that," and I remembered, in the lab, Mother telling me that we had a destiny, the Cetra did, the two of us did. She'd said she'd tell me more once we were safely away from Shinra, but she was shot as we were leaving. She hid it from me, from everyone, as long as she could – I think she was trying to heal herself – but she collapsed at the station. She was trying to tell me even then, pressing the materia into my hand and telling me to listen to the Planet, if I needed it I'd know, just listen, but I was crying too hard even to listen to her.

Cloud's not that much like Zack. Not all the time. If you get him flustered, or embarrassed, if you're faster or trickier than him, someone else shows through, a shy kid who blushes when I make certain jokes and gets tongue-tied around me. I loved Zack, though I spent years telling myself I really never had. But Cloud's someone different, I'm sure of it, and whether or not fate has anything to do with it, even if meeting him the way I did was sheer coincidence, I want to get to know him. _Him,_ not this eerie Zack front he likes to use, though I'd really like to know what that's about, too.

Mom didn't believe me when I called home from Kalm and told her it was all about curiosity, but that was as true as any of the other plausible answers.


End file.
